● ● ●  her toward a mental theory of disease. Mrs. Patterson already had a thoroughgoing skepticism of medicines and of “outward applications”—the salves, plasters, and poultices which were the stock in trade of nineteenth-century doctors. And with her biblical background the final sentence in the quoted passage can hardly have failed to strike a responsive note.

That being the case, it is not surprising that in May, 1862, she wrote Quimby, “I have entire confidence in your philosophy as read in the circular sent my husband.”³³ His philosophy was to offer her a greater challenge than any she had yet encountered. Quimby himself usually referred to it as his “theory” or simply as “the truth,” but in order to understand what he meant by the latter term it is necessary to turn once again to developments before 1862.³⁴

Among the early practitioners of animal magnetism were those who thought it should be a purely scientific study and those who gave it all sorts of religious and mystical interpretations. Theorists who sought religious sanction for it were apt to cite the second chapter of Genesis, in which Jehovah cast Adam into a “deep sleep,” as the first recorded instance of magnetism. Especially was it popular to identify magnetic healings with the healings of Jesus, and every biblical instance of the “laying on of hands” was hailed as an example of mesmerism.

Of those who attempted to make it both a science and a religion, none attracted more attention than Andrew Jackson Davis. In 1843 in the village of Poughkeepsie, New York, seventeen-year-old Davis had his first experience of the mesmeric trance state. In subsequent experiences he was guided by the “spirits” of Galen and Swedenborg into a strange amalgam of mesmerism, spiritualism, Swedenborgianism, pantheism, and deism which profoundly impressed large numbers of his contemporaries.